arXiv:2601.18493v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) show promise for disaster-response remote sensing, but existing benchmarks mainly emphasize scene-level or damage-ce...
By Sara Tehrani, Yonghao Xu, Leif Haglund, Amanda Berg, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Michael Felsberg
The paper introduces GRDisaster, a multi-task geospatial reasoning framework that leverages vision‑language models to interpret, geolocalize, and assess damage in crowdsourced disaster imagery. It builds on a new benchmark dataset of 26,340 images from PhotoMappers, linking volunteer geographic information, street‑view imagery, and remote sensing data across multiple disaster events from 2018 to 2024. GRDisaster combines deterministic and probabilistic cross‑view geolocalization with multi‑view fusion, and introduces spatial reasoning indicators to validate cross‑view matches and quantify disaster severity using expert‑verified annotations.
By Wenping Yin, Fabian Desuer, Ziqi Liu, Naixia Mou, Weijia Li, Pedram Ghamisi, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Hao Li
SAFIRE is a large-scale benchmark for fire and smoke understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), featuring 83,000 captioned images across 20 scenarios and 193,000 multiple-choice VQA questions derived from a 9.7K-image subset. The benchmark evaluates 10 dimensions of performance, from basic perception to higher-order reasoning, and employs a GPT‑5.4-assisted verification pipeline to ensure annotation quality. Experiments on ten open-source MLLMs (8B–38B) reveal an average accuracy of 61.9%, highlighting significant gaps in safety-critical reasoning, while fine-tuning vision encoders on just 7% of SAFIRE data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%. All resources are publicly available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.
By Pengfei Li, Naufal Suryanto, Sicheng Zhang, Mohammad Alsharid, Muzammal Naseer
arXiv:2607. 22746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed.
By Hongruixuan Chen, He Huang, Haifeng Wang, Jian Song, Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Hamish Mitchell, Jiepan Li, Wei He, Liangpei Zhang, Zijie Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiazhen Zhao, Lei Hu, Ting Hu, Hongyan Zhang, Gregory Angelides, Miriam Cha, Clifford Broni-Bediako, Junshi Xia, Taylor Perron, Naoto Yokoya
DamageScope is a retrieval‑augmented framework that combines satellite imagery, Vision‑Language Models (VLMs), and Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate property damage assessment after natural disasters. It uses a Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to extract structured visual representations from satellite images, enabling interactive natural language queries. The system introduces a multi‑vector embedding‑based clustering algorithm that improves scalability and reduces indexing time by up to 14×, and a dual‑store data architecture that cuts LLM API calls, lowering operational cost and response latency by roughly 3×.
By Ravi K. Rajendran, Biplob Debnath, Murugan Sankaradas, Srimat T. Chakradhar
arXiv:2606. 06217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a disaster unfolds, responders must answer not only what is happening, but also why it is happening, what will happen next, and what to do now, often from noisy low-altitude UAV views and under tight on-site compute constraints.
By Tan Zhang, Quanyou Li, Lu Zhang, Jun Liu, Xiaofeng Zhu, Ping Hu